Beall's List Removed: What Stands Between Us and Open Access Predators?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ease in which electronic journals can be launched has led to the emergence of a new type of “scientific” journal, focused entirely on revenues and barely concerned with content, alas attempting to camouflage as the real thing. In 2010 Jeffrey Beall created an online public repository that listed open access journals suspected of predatory behavior, based on 52 predefined criteria, such as lack of peer review process, appointing fake academic boards, and false operating location.1Butler D. Investigating journals: the dark side of publishing.Nature. 2013; 495: 433-435Crossref PubMed Scopus (238) Google Scholar Beall's list served as a platform for publications addressing the topic of open access predatory journals.2Shen C. Bjork B.C. ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics.BMC Med. 2015; 13: 230Crossref PubMed Scopus (447) Google Scholar Of 30 consecutive unsolicited e-mails to a pediatrician (FBM) (n = 10), dermatologist (DM) (n = 10), and internist (EB) (n = 10) requesting paper submissions, all but 1 were on Beall's list. The OMICS Publishing Group prominently appeared on Beall's list. In 2013 the US National Institute of Health stopped listing OMICS publications in PubMed Central and requested that this publisher stop making false claims of US government affiliations.3Kaiser J. U.S. government accuses open access publisher of trademark infringement.www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/05/us-government-accuses-open-access-publisher-trademark-infringementGoogle Scholar OMICS threatened to sue Beall, seeking $1 billion in damages,4New J. Publisher threatens to sue blogger for $1-billion.www.chronicle.com/article/Publisher-Threatens-to-Sue/139243/Google Scholar and Beall felt “personally threatened.”5Chappell B. Publisher threatens librarian with $1 billion lawsuit.www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/05/15/184233141/publisher-threatens-librarian-with-1-billion-lawsuitGoogle Scholar Another open access publisher (Canadian Center for Science and Education) stated that inclusion of their company on Beall's list was defamation and threatened “civil action.”6Flaherty C. Librarians and lawyers.www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/15/another-publisher-accuses-librarian-libelGoogle Scholar On January 17, 2017 Beall's List and blog were taken offline. The University of Colorado declared that this decision was a “personal one” from Beall.7Chawla D.S. Mystery as controversial list of predatory publishers disappears.www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/mystery-controversial-list-predatory-publishers-disappearsGoogle Scholar Though it was speculated that the list would be moved to the stewardship of Cabell's International, the company denied any relationship with Beall, stating that the blog shut down owing to “threats and politics.”8Straumsheim C. No more ‘Beall's List’.www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/18/librarians-list-predatory-journals-reportedly-removed-due-threats-and-politicsGoogle Scholar Currently the no-longer-updated list can be retrieved through web archiving services and will probably become obsolete over time. Though online directories, such as the “Directory of Open Access Journals,” enable to check for whitelisted journals, we are not aware of an active source warning against potential predatory journals. We believe that the scientific community should benefit from a regularly updated list of open access predatory journals, as was provided by Beall. We propose that international scientific organizations, such as the International Committee of Journals Editors, should take up this challenge and define criteria enabling the distinction between legitimate medical and scientific journals and predatory journals. Refraining from addressing the emergence of pseudo-journals publishing pseudo-science may slowly erode the legitimacy of well-conducted science.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.036 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it